


Shards Of Yesterday

by glasslogic



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-13
Updated: 2012-05-13
Packaged: 2017-11-05 06:47:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/403549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasslogic/pseuds/glasslogic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The voices in Sam's head aren't the usual ones, and the poltergeist in the glass factory isn't making anything better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shards Of Yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> So, apparently I was more fuzzy on the order of happenstance at the end of season 6 than I thought. I was under the impression that Sam was having hallucinations that Dean knew about before the whole throw down with Castiel and random plot reveal in the season finale. Since I was wrong, the timeline in this fic is a little off when interpreted strictly as per canon. However, it really shouldn't cause any problems in understanding what's happening.
> 
> This story was written for the 2011 SPn Reverse Big Bang. Art done by moodilylit. See further information and author's notes and thanks at: http://glasslogic.livejournal.com/29563.html

 

** Shards Of Yesterday **

Sam opened heavy eyelids to the harsh glow of 5:00 am on the alarm clock and the tinny strains of “Traveling Riverside Blues” from the cell phone on the nightstand that had roused him from sleep. He had the dim idea that it had been ringing for a while, weaving insistently into his dreams until he had no choice but to surface and deal with it.

Softly muttered complaints in the form of four-letter words from behind his back let him know that he wasn’t the only one pulled from sleep. Since it wasn’t _his_ ringtone, Sam felt no compunction about scooping up the cell and dropping it onto Dean’s chest. A heartbeat later Sam heard the distinctive snap of the hinge as his brother flipped the phone open and then Dean’s half-snarled, “ _What_?”

Neither of them were sleeping well or easily lately, and it was painful to surrender what little rest they found. Sam switched on the bedside lamp and swung his legs over, resigned to consciousness.

“One sec, Bobby. Hang on--" Dean’s hand locked like an iron band around Sam's wrist before Sam could shrug off the sheet and stand. Sam twisted to give his brother an irritated look. Dean had the phone pressed to his chest and his gaze was hard and focused. Sam stopped resisting and slumped back.

“What’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything, Sam?”

Sam rolled his eyes, having grown tired of the game days ago. “Forty-two.” Dean released him wordlessly and put the phone back up to his ear. Sam went to find clean clothes in his duffle bag, if he still _had_ clean clothes. He paid the conversation little attention, but couldn’t help but overhear Dean’s side of it.

“Yeah, Bobby. We’re still sharing the bed.” A long pause. “Well, I don’t exactly have a lot of options.” Another pause. “He stole my car! And didn’t even know he was _driving_. Excuse me if I want to know _exactly where he is_ while I’m sleeping.”

Sam pressed a shirt to his face, wrinkled his nose, and tossed it in the dirty pile.

“Handcuffs? You don’t think that’s a little extreme?”

It wasn’t, they had tried that days ago. But Sam’s ability to pick locks wasn’t damaged by the voices in his head and that experiment had lasted less than a night.

“No, it’s fine. Like being twelve again. I don’t think I slept more than a handful of nights alone until I was twenty. You knew Dad; his idea of good sleeping arrangements for us was sharing a couch.”

But when Dean was twelve, a queen bed was more than enough room for them to both toss and turn and throw elbows in their sleep. As adults, it was an entirely different story. But Sam couldn’t get up without waking Dean when they shared the bed, and Dean wouldn’t let him go unless Sam could answer whatever inane question came to his mind. It wasn’t foolproof, but at least if he responded to Dean, it was reasonably likely he was focused on reality and not the distorted reflections cast by the break down of the barrier in his mind. Or that was their theory anyway.

The only other option was to lock him back up in Bobby’s basement. Or put a bullet in his brain. They were carefully not discussing either possibility, acting instead like the situation was temporary, like he would _get better_.

Sam finally found a shirt that was less offensive than the others and gathered his jeans up from floor.

“Glass factory?” Dean’s surprised voice carried across the room. Sam slipped into the bathroom and pressed the door firmly closed before he overheard anything else. Whatever was going on could wait until he had a shower.

When done, he toweled off roughly and dressed, then wiped condensation from the mirror while he decided about shaving or not. Black spider-webbed cracks radiated out from a chipped edge and cast lines through his reflection. It made him feel a little unsettled; off-balance in that corner of his mind he thought of as the Cage. That little corner was always there, a subtle itch that needed scratching. But indulging the desire would hasten the breakdown of the walls that kept the Cage contained, and when those walls went down the memories of what he had endured in Hell would unstring his mind -- or so Death himself had promised. Sam hoped the collapse was a long way off. He privately doubted it, though. The barrier was only slightly weakened and already he couldn’t tell reality from delusion when an attack hit. So far the episodes had been brief and caused no real harm, but worse was coming. He could feel it, like being tied to a train track when the rails start vibrating.

Sam turned resolutely away from the mirror and opened the door; the carpet felt disgusting under his bare, damp feet, but it was better than the icy cold of the grungy tile and the black lattice of the broken glass cast over his own face.

Dean was still sprawled on bed, the phone closed now and lying next to him on the sheets. He watched disgruntled as Sam paced through the room.

“Feeling okay?” Dean finally asked.

“Are you real?”

“That isn’t funny, Sam.” Dean scowled.

Sam shrugged. “I feel fine. I _always_ feel fine. What did Bobby want?”

Dean stood up and stretched, letting the topic of Sam’s questionable sanity go. He pulled on his jeans and fumbled his feet into the boots that he’d kicked off earlier beside the bed. “Of all stupid things -- there’s a haunting a couple of hours down the road he wants us to look into. Some factory. He knows I don’t want to take jobs right now. That’s why we’re on the freaking road in the first place dropping off his mystical thingamahickies to idiots who can’t make their own kelpie traps!”

“What did you tell him?” Sam asked, trying to feign interest. In was hard to be interested in anything anymore. He just felt so tired all the time. Waiting for the inevitable.

Dean finished tying his laces and dragged his jacket on over the t-shirt he had slept in. “I told him we’d think about it. He gave me some info.” Dean motioned towards the nightstand where his semi-legible scrawl covered the margin of a take-out menu. “You want to look into it while I pick-up breakfast?”

Sam glanced at the clock. “At 5:20 in the morning?”

“There’s a donut shop across the road.” Dean shrugged. “I thought I’d grab some coffee and muffins, then we can hit the road. We can head in that direction and decide how to let Bobby down along the way.”

“I can tell you’re really serious about the _thinking it over_ part,” Sam commented.  
Dean patted his pockets down to make sure he had his wallet, his expression darkening. “Do you think this is a really good time for us to be taking jobs, Sam? With your... _whatever_ going on and all?”

“I don’t think we should be stalking werewolves or anything like that, but doing some research and maybe a little salt and burn shouldn’t be too much for us to handle.”

“Because we’ve never gotten the crap kicked out of us while seasoning a spook before,” Dean snorted. “I’m just not happy about taking cases right now, I can’t watch your back, my back, _and_ do the damn job, you know? Two of those things -- no problem. But three of them and someone’s going to get hurt. Or killed.”

“You still want me to look it up then? If we’ve already decided we’re not going to do it, then it just seems like a waste of time.”

Dean sighed and raked his fingers through his short hair. Half of the furrows left in their wake stood straight up, but Sam managed to keep his amusement off his face. He hadn’t found much funny lately, and wanted to enjoy it while it lasted.

“Yeah. Yeah, go ahead and look into it. I might as well at least have something to discuss when I tell Bobby to bite me. Back in fifteen minutes.”

Dean’s handwriting hadn’t improved much since about the fourth grade, but Sam had decades of practice deciphering it. Hooking up to the neighboring, more expensive, hotel’s Internet and finding what he was after only took a few minutes after that. For a haunting, it was about as bad as bad could be in their business. It would have been nice to have something to do for a while other than play wandering errand boys for Bobby and the loose network of hunters he supplied, but Sam had to agree that Dean was absolutely right to call this job a pass.

“You need to take this job.” The unexpected voice spoke practically in his ear, causing Sam to almost slid off the bed in shock. He scrambled to catch the laptop before it could hit the ground.  
“Cas!”

The angel gave him an odd, assessing look. “Hello, Sam. You and Dean must take this job.”

“What do you mean we ‘must take this job’? I looked it up and--” Sam started to protest before Castiel cut him off.

“It is very important that you and Dean handle this matter.”

Sam looked at him helplessly. “You already said that, but... Look, Dean’s on his way back. Hang out a couple of minutes and then explain to us--“

“I don’t have time to ‘hang out’ or ‘explain.’ I would not be here if it was not important. Go to Evanston.”

“Cas--“ Sam tried again, but the angel was gone.

~~~~~

  
Dean was too pissed to listen to any details about the job after Sam dropped Castiel’s little bombshell on him. He shoved a Styrofoam cup of coffee into Sam’s hands and then packed his few belongings with harsh, angry movements. Sam understood; Dean had come up with a variety of excuses for why it was important to talk to Cas over the last few weeks, but Sam knew it all boiled down to finding a way to shore up the barrier in Sam’s mind that was fracturing by the day. But the angel had already insisted he knew of no way to do that, and Sam suspected his conspicuous absences had to do with not wanting to put up with Dean’s increasingly bad behavior over a problem that had no solutions.  
  
Dean had not taken abandonment well.  
  
Sam wasn’t sure if his own acceptance of the situation was exhaustion, resignation, or a strange kind of maturity. Some things just couldn’t be fixed. You made your choices, then lived with the consequences. No one had ever claimed life would be fair.  
  
Once the car was packed and he’d eaten his share of breakfast, Sam elected to nap instead of listening to Dean’s irritated grumblings. It was easier to find sleep slumped over in the rumble of the Impala’s familiar embrace than in the quiet stillness of a motel room. Laying with Dean in the shared darkness always felt like waiting for a disaster in exactly the same way that the Impala always felt safe.  
  
He woke up when the car slowed down as Dean exited off the interstate. Sam’s face was hot from the sunlight and drool was sticky at the corner of his mouth. He hastily wiped it off, hoping Dean hadn’t noticed. He ducked inside to grab more coffee while Dean filled the tank. The fall air in the parking lot was bitingly cold and Sam was grateful for the heat radiating from the cups. He slid back inside the car and handed one to his brother.  
  
“Okay. Talk,” Dean ordered as he pulled back on the interstate.  
  
“I tried talking earlier and couldn’t even hear myself over the cursing,” Sam pointed out.  
  
“I’m better now.” From his tense grip on the wheel, Sam doubted that, but it was probably as good as things were going to get for a while.  
  
“Soooo...” Sam found the notebook he had been using to copy things down into and flipped to the first page with his notes. “The factory was built in 1958 for Wilson Glass. They manufactured pane glass. Windows, doors, maybe mirrors -- that kind of thing. It sounds like there were problems from the get go. I only had about ten minutes to look into this, Dean, but one of the articles I saw credits more than twenty deaths to the ghost in the three years the factory was open before the company locked the doors and walked away.”  
  
“Fine,” Dean growled. “Bodies, abandoned building, angry ghost -- sounds pretty typical so far. Still not anything someone who can’t tell reality from the _hell beasts_ in his head needs to be dealing with, but we can probably manage if we have too. What’s the catch?”  
  
“This isn’t just an angry ghost,” Sam said reluctantly, “this is a _seriously_ pissed-off spook. _Twenty bodies_ , Dean! Those dead guys didn’t accidentally trip and impale themselves on something... it’s a full-blown poltergeist.”  
  
The silence in the car seemed to stretch for a small eternity. “Dean?”  
  
“I’m not even going to get into whatever the hell _Cas_ is smoking, but do you think Bobby hates us or something? Did we do something to him, like, I don’t know -- run his panties up a flag pole and I forgot about it?” Dean sounded more bewildered than angry. “Not that I wouldn’t have _wanted_ to forget about that. But a _poltergeist_? In a _glass factory_?! This would be a stupid thing even if we were at our best. And I hate to tell you, Sam, but it’s been awhile since either one of us have really had our heads that much in the game.”  
  
Sam flipped to another page. “I don’t think Bobby hates us. I think he saw an opportunity. You want to let me finish before you blow up this time?”  
  
Dean flipped him the bird. Sam accepted the apology and continued.  
  
“The ghost is powerful, but erratic. There are big fits of activity, and then years of nothing.”  
  
“Like it’s pitching one big tantrum, then having to store up the energy again?”  
  
“Exactly,” Sam agreed. “When they shut the factory down in 1961 it was because six of those victims died in the same day. Apparently of, uh--“  
  
“Being in a fucking glass factory with a _poltergeist_?!” Dean guessed.  
  
“Yeah. That.” Sam pushed on before Dean could get too invested in that idea. Again. “But they explained it by some crap about poor maintenance and building codes. Since then, every five to ten years something weird and unexplained happens -- sometimes fatal, weird and unexplained things. Violent windstorms, teenagers poking around claim to be thrown physically off the property by invisible hands, cars get shoved off the road--“  
  
“Off the _road_?” Dean asked incredulously. “How far away from the factory is this thing’s range?”  
  
“I didn’t see any account of anyone who’d been inside since the building was sealed, but it looks like most of the reported manifestations are either in the parking lot or... in the surrounding neighborhood.”  
  
Dean slammed one hand on the wheel. “This is fantastic, Sam! This just gets better and better. A poltergeist in a glass factory, God knows _what’s_ inside that _Cas_ wants us to handle, and for all you know right now you’re sitting on a curb chatting up a telephone pole! I can’t imagine how _this_ can go wrong.”  
  
Sam read silently for a few minutes until Dean heaved a sigh. “Fine. What’s this opportunity you think Bobby saw?”  
  
“The factory is locked up, but the building next door shares the parking lot. Yesterday the ghost flipped two parked cars out into rush hour traffic.”  
  
Dean shook his head in resigned disgust. “So... the theory is that it should be holed up somewhere weak and fuming? Not able to rattle a wind chime?”  
  
“I think that’s the idea.”  
  
“You know, the problem with ideas, Sammy, is that some poor sap has to find out if they’re good ones or not. Why can’t this wait? It’s been going on since the sixties, and if it’s just had this tantrum and was tossing about _cars_ , then it should be nice and quiet for a couple of years. Someone else can look into it.”  
  
“It’s centered somewhere inside the factory, Dean. A building full of _glass_ , it doesn’t have to be very strong to kill someone. It’s at its weakest point right now. _Now_ is the time to do something about it.”  
  
“Now?” Dean repeated skeptically. “Why _now_? So we don’t get it this time. In five or ten years, when it pitches another fit, someone can go take care of it. It hasn’t been worth anyone’s time in the last fifty years, it’s not worth our lives now.”  
  
When Sam didn’t say anything Dean groaned. “What _else_?!”  
  
Sam drew a deep breath. “It’s just that since the spirit seems tied to the building’s construction, whatever is going on might not be solved just by razing the place.”  
  
“Is that likely to happen?”  
  
“Next week,” Sam confirmed. “The area was industrial, but it’s been turning more mainstream in the last decade or so, and the property owners sold the building lot to the school board. They’re going to build a school there, Dean.”  
  
“With a violent, angry, poltergeist in its basement. Fucking fantastic.”  
  
“The part of town is becoming busier in general.” Sam glanced at his brother. “One of the cars it threw into traffic hit a school bus full of middle-schoolers.”  
  
Dean’s eyes tightened a fraction, the change of expression probably unnoticeable to anyone who didn’t know him as well as Sam did. Middle-schoolers. Kids Ben’s age.  
  
Losing Ben and Lisa was a scar on his brother that surprised Sam with its depth sometimes. He had lost Jessica, but as profound as that loss was, there had been something still transitory and temporary feeling about their relationship. They had been planning a life, invested in their _potential_. But Dean had left Lisa’s house every morning for work and gone to sleep every night in Lisa’s bed for a year. Had helped Ben with his homework, watched movies together on the couch, decorated for the holidays... Dean hadn’t been planning anything. He’d had a family, and a son, and a woman he was all but married to. Sam couldn’t imagine what it had cost his brother to walk away from that. Wondered if anything but the threat to Ben and Lisa’s lives could have made him, in the end.  
  
But that was over now. Another life in the rearview mirror.  
  
“Was anyone hurt?” Dean asked quietly, bringing Sam’s wandering attention back to the present.  
  
“Scared and a few bumps and bruises. No one died.”  
  
“Yet.”  
  
“Are you talking about us or the ghost?”  
  
Dean gave him a sidelong look of irritation. “You’re a riot. And none of this brings up the biggest problem with this mess.”  
  
Sam nodded, knowing exactly what Dean was referring to. “What interest does Castiel have in the place?”  
  
“Exactly. Because I can absolutely guarantee whatever it is, it’s going to make the rest of this seem like a cake-walk.”  
  
“Does that mean you’re interested in taking the job?” Sam raised an eyebrow.  
  
“Bobby asked us to look into this. Cas apparently _ordered_ us to -- and I can’t tell you how excited I still am about _that_ , by the way. But they both usually know what they’re talking about. We’re heading in that direction -- may as well poke around. Rattle some cages. See what tries to kill us. I mean -- a freaking _school_?”  
  
“So like any other job, then.”  
  
“Yeah,” Dean snorted. “For us anyway. What about you? You okay with looking into this -- with everything else going on?”  
  
Sam looked out the window at the golden blur of fall grass alongside the highway. “It’s important; maybe we can even save some lives. Do something other than sit on our asses and run errands.”  
  
Something other than wait for the inevitable.  
  
Dean growled something under his breath, then seemed to shift the entire problem to the back of his mind. “We’re still about two hours out. What do you want for lunch?”

~~~~~

  
Sam drummed one hand on the cheap laminate of the table and picked idly through his salad with the other. The dressing wasn’t very good and the lettuce was wilted around the edges, but he was still enjoying the croutons. He had been sitting in the diner for going on six hours and was ignoring the dirty looks from the section’s waitress -- there was free Internet and Sam was making good use of it. Their motel had free wireless too, for once, but Sam didn’t think he could stand to sit in there alone with the walls closing in for the afternoon while Dean hit up city records. The corner diner across the street wasn’t exactly overrun with customers, so he didn’t feel bad about practically moving in.  
  
The afternoon had been somewhat enlightening, but Sam figured he had exhausted everything the internet had that was of interest to the case. Now it was just a matter of waiting for Dean to show back up -- hopefully with the rest of the pieces. Which should have been two hours ago. Sam sighed and clicked on another link. At this point everything was repetitive, but there was always a chance of finding something he had missed on an earlier pass.  
  
“Why aren’t you at the factory?”  
  
Sam startled so hard he banged a knee on the bottom of the table. Castiel was sitting across from him in the booth. The angel picked up the menu curiously.  
  
“There’s nothing in there you want to eat,” Sam offered, rubbing his knee under the table.  
  
Blue eyes flicked his way, then refocused on the greasy plastic in his hands. “Why aren’t you at the factory, Sam?”  
  
Sam closed the laptop and leaned in. A quick glance around told him no one was paying them any attention, meaning no one had noticed the angel’s sudden arrival. “We’re doing some research. We can’t just jump into a situation like this blind--“  
  
“There is nothing you will be able to research that will help you with this. Go there.”  
  
“Dean doesn’t even want to do this at _all_ , and I’m not real happy about it either,” Sam hissed. “The least you can do is throw us a bone. What is so important about this job that it’s worth charging in blindly and getting killed over?! Because I called Bobby, Cas, and he’s keen on getting it done, but he doesn’t have a clue why _you’d_ be interested.”  
  
“Things are not always as they seem, Sam.”  
  
“I, of all people, _really_ get that. But--“ A sudden crash caught Sam’s attention and he looked over reflexively, only to find a very embarrassed waitress trying to pick up a dropped tray.  
  
When he looked back, the angel was gone.

~~~~~

  
“Of course he vanished, Sam,” Dean said in disgust when Sam relayed the episode about an hour later. Dean was steadily munching his way through a pile of over-cooked French fries while Sam flipped through a stack of photocopies Dean had scored at the city records office. They were old, reduced reproductions of originals that had been long lost to time, but they were still interesting. “He knew if he stayed he was going to have to answer questions, and apparently that’s just not something the third wheel of Team Free Will is into these days.”  
  
“He’s not exactly having an easy time of things either, Dean. He’s fighting for control of _Heaven_. It’s understandable he might not exactly have a lot of time to hang out with us playing twenty questions.”  
  
Dean stabbed a fry into the ketchup with unnecessary force. “Yeah, well, I’m thinking ‘Team Fucked’ would have been a more apt description. And he sure as hell has the time to drop in to visit long enough to assign these little chores!” Dean’s bitter outburst seemed to surprise himself more than it surprised Sam and he lapsed into silence.  
  
“We won,” Sam said quietly after a moment.  
  
“What?”  
  
“We won,” Sam repeated. “Team Free Will.”  
  
“Yeah,” Dean snorted. “And look how great _that’s_ turned out for us.”  
  
Sam looked outside to where cars passed on the street and people walked slowly down the sidewalk. A couple hand in hand, giggly girls with shopping bags, a few just briskly on their way to other places. “Yeah,” he echoed his brother, but with entirely different meaning.  
  
Dean followed his gaze, then pushed the plate away and leaned back in the booth. “I’m not _sorry_ , Sam. I just--“  
  
“It’s the price. I’m grateful.” Sam caught his brother’s gaze and held it, trying to convey the truth of his words to the person who loved him most in the world. “Grateful that we won, that the world is still here. That I was rescued and I have this time now. Whatever else comes later, it was worth it, Dean.”  
  
Dean’s eyes held a wealth of pain, guilt, and genuine fury as Sam’s words sank in. Then the emotions were blanked out beneath Dean’s usual defenses of irritation and impatience. Sam remembered a time before those defenses had been raised against him by habit, and knew his brother would switch subjects before Dean even opened his mouth. He didn’t know how to fix the rift that the past few years and their own actions had created between them.  
  
“Back to the more immediate example of how everything in this life is out to screw us,” Dean said, unaware of the direction of Sam’s thought, ”what did you find out? There wasn’t really anything out at city records except those papers and some local gossip.” He snagged a fry from the plate and pointed at the loose sheets in Sam’s hands with it before popping it into his mouth. “But not anything good or more useful than the Internet. I spoke with a dozen people, including seven who lived here when the damn thing was built in the first place, and got a dozen wildly different stories on what the hell is going on around here. Everything from aliens to jilted lovers, and none of it fits the scenario we’re dealing with.”  
  
Sam nodded, frowning at the documents he was flipping through. “This pretty much goes with what I’ve found from the web and making a few calls. It was an empty lot, no prior construction. Nothing attached to the land I can find at all as far as legends or strange stories go. Not even any really notable murders or missing people reported here or in any of the surrounding counties for the months before construction started. The building was originally supposed to be some kind of stockyard processing area, but people complained and it created such a problem that the owners sold the half-completed construction to Wilson Glass. Then the new owners made the changes they needed for glass manufacturing and storage. It was pretty much a disaster from the start. The problems actually began with the initial construction, but there weren’t any fatalities until later on, so people only talk about the glass factory.”  
  
“Thing got worse _after_ the building was completed?” Dean raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like strong evidence that something bad happened during construction. Unless they were doing something special that might piss of the ghost once they opened?”  
  
Sam shrugged and dropped the papers back on the table. “It doesn’t sound like it from what I can tell. They were just trying to operate a business. It doesn’t look like there was anything else shady going on. It’s had a pretty high double fence around it since they shut it down, and the cops patrol it regularly enough that like I said, I can’t find any first-hand accounts of anyone who’s been in there since the day they sealed it up.”  
  
“That’s impressive,” Dean commented, fishing a crouton Sam had missed out of his abandoned salad. “Teenagers tend to weasel into these kinds of places like rats.”  
  
“The graphic pictures of impaled bodies they apparently pass around under the table probably help deter any real interest. Cops and fifteen foot fences with razor wire do the rest.”  
  
Dean stopped eating. “What impaled bodies?”  
  
Sam opened the laptop again and found the page he wanted, then turned it so Dean could see. “Remember what I said about teenagers being thrown off the property?”  
  
“You didn’t say onto _street signs_.” Dean glanced at the ketchup covered plate and pushed it away. “And nobody thought leveling this place was a good idea before now?”  
  
Sam shrugged and reclaimed the laptop. “They didn’t have a good reason too, and no one wants to say ‘ghosts’ out loud.”  
  
“You would think with images like _that_ on everybody’s mind, someone would have mumbled something about a bad foundation and everyone else would have just nodded along to get the job done,” Dean said with a hint of disbelief. “Any more activity from it today?”  
  
“Nope. Seems quiet since the traffic incident.”  
  
“I guess we’re doing this then,” Dean sighed. “Oh, hey--“ He pulled a battered white paper bag out of his pocket and offered it across the table to Sam. Sam took it cautiously and was surprised to find two slightly smooshed cookies inside.  
  
“What’s this for?”  
  
“It’s like those billboards you see on the walls in stores. For how many days they’ve been accident free, you know? Except in your case, it’s day’s without unholy manifestations of your quality time in the Cage fucking with our lives. Go a week, get a cookie.”  
  
“But you gave me two cookies,” was all Sam could think to say, bemused by the gesture.  
  
“Yeah, one of those is mine. I earned it by not shoving you into the floor every time your cold, overgrown feet touch me in bed.” Two women in the restaurant gave them an odd look and then leaned into whisper to each other. Dean glared at them until they moved.  
  
“Gee, Dean. That’s so--” _thoughtful_ was definitely not the word he was looking for, “you.”  
  
“Yeah, I’m a freaking saint. Now give me my cookie and start planning what you want to bring to tonight’s little exercise in ‘how many ways can we get ourselves killed.’”

~~~~~

  
The factory, when they finally saw it in person, was an almost disappointingly unimpressive structure. What could be seen of it, anyway. Most of it was hidden by a fifteen foot corrugated steel fence that surrounded the actual building, and what was visible over that was old, dark brick, occasionally accented by the particularly relentless vines that had climbed their way to the roof over time. The top panes of dark windows glittered ominously in the late afternoon sunlight, like wary eyes peering cautiously out onto the world.  
  
The steel fence was set about ten feet behind an equally tall chain-link fence with an impressive enough lock on it that Dean actually blew a low whistle of admiration when they cruised past.  
  
“That’s a sweet lock. Too bad invited people don’t care, and the uninvited who want in wouldn’t waste their time messing with the _lock_ on a chain link fence.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s like they don’t know why god gave us wire cutters.”  
  
They were still discussing options an hour later, the sun had long since set and they were settled comfortably in the window booth of a seedy bar. It was a little ways down the road from the factory and gave them a good vantage to continue their observation.  
  
“The problem isn’t the actual getting in part,” Sam mused. “It’s having enough time to do it.”  
  
Dean nodded, watching with narrowed eyes as yet another police car circled the building. The patrols were inconveniently frequent, and they could only speculate that the recent explosion of activity was behind the current diligence. Roughly every fifteen minutes a patrol car pulled off the road, ambled through the parking lot, and circled the building, sweeping every inch of the fence perimeter with harsh, unforgiving light.  
  
“Fifteen minutes might be enough time to get in, or it might not,” Dean said. “Depends on how hard the second fence is to handle. Fifteen feet without a foothold on a smooth fence topped with razor wire... we might be better off trying to go through it, and that’s not going to be that fast.”  
  
Another hour of observation and the patrols were still running almost as regularly as clockwork.  
  
“This is stupid! Don’t these cops have anything _better_ to do?” Dean asked, voice heavy with annoyance.  
  
Sam swallowed the rest of his water and stood up. “The town isn’t that big; this can’t be more than one or two different cars, right?”  
  
“If it is, they have way too many bored cops on the payroll. Usually it’s the opposite problem.”  
  
“Right. Let’s go. I need to find a pay phone on a nice, deserted street corner.”  
  
Dean grinned and tossed a twenty on the table to cover their tab. “Lead on, Sammy.”  
  
“Stop calling me that.”  
  
Twenty minutes later the patrol circling the building switched on its lights and pulled away in a flurry of noise and sound, merging into the light traffic and speeding off in the direction of other distant sirens.  
  
“That won’t take long,” Sam observed.  
  
“It will take long enough,” Dean said with satisfaction. “Screams and gunshots coming from some random room at a skeezy motel? That place rents by the hour. The cops will have to assume everyone they talk to is lying to them. Even if they shrug it off, it’s going to be at least thirty minutes.”  
  
They left the Impala in the back of the neighboring building where she would hopefully remain unnoticed and made quick work of getting through the chain link at the back of the factory. There was plenty of evidence that others had gotten this far in the past, but the snipped links had been meticulously mended.  
  
Sam kept a wary eye out for anything unusual in the night while Dean cut their way in with the ease of long practice. But everything around them stayed dark and still while they used a thin length of wire to tie the cut links back together so a brief glance wouldn’t show an obvious problem.  
  
The inner fence was a different matter entirely.  
  
“Looks like a custom job. Hand me the crowbar.” Dean paced about twenty feet along the steel, testing the riveted seams, before finding one he seemed to like and putting muscle into getting the bar in. It wasn’t a fast process, nor a particularly quiet one and Sam felt about to crawl out of his skin with anxiety at every pop or screech of protesting metal. It probably wasn’t _that_ noisy, but it felt that way to nerves raw with tension.  
  
“I just wish Cas had taken a sec to give us a clue as to what the hell he expects us to find in here that he’s interested in,” Dean panted as he worked the metal apart. “I mean, it would have been freaking nice if we could have prepared ourselves, you know? It’s not like he’s never asked us to deal with anything a little _forethought_ wouldn’t have made easier.”  
  
Sam couldn’t think of _anything_ easy they had ever done that involved Castiel, forethought or not.  
  
“Like, what if this is another one of those super-nasty angelic weapons? What if it’s the freaking Ark of the Covenant stashed away in here and he expects us to baby-sit it until he can get off his feathery ass to reclaim it?”  
  
“How the hell would you prepare to handle something like the Ark, Dean?” Sam hissed.  
  
“Well,” Dean said thoughtfully, “for starters, I’d pack a lot of duct tape.”  
  
“ _Duct tape_?”  
  
“To keep the lid on. I’ve seen that movie too, Sam. Things aren’t so bad that I want to be accidentally melted.”  
  
“Movie... You mean _Indiana Jones_?” Sam stared at his brother, unsure of how serious Dean was being at the moment.  
  
“It’s a good film. Very instructional. Like _Cool Hand Luke_ or the _Texas Chainsaw Massacre_.”  
  
Now Sam was almost positive he was being teased. Almost.  
  
Before he could make sure, Dean set the crowbar down on the ground and wiped his gloved hands off on grimy jeans, then flicked his brother a satisfied look and used sheer muscle to shove the short opening he had created wide enough that he could slip through.  
  
“Good thing they didn’t bury the base,” he grunted as he squeezed himself onto the other side and gave Sam an impatient gesture to hurry up. Sam left skin on the rough metal edges of the opening Dean had created, but managed to follow him through nonetheless.  
  
Inside the fence it was as if even the moonlight had been extinguished. They had moved less than three feet in space, but the very air now felt dark, almost unwholesome. Like it was heavier than it should have been, and much, much too still.  
  
“Jesus,” Dean muttered, pulling the metal as much back into position as was possible from the inside. The cops swept the place regularly, but after doing it so many times Sam and Dean were banking on the actual looking part being cursory and uninterested. “This feels like a real fun place, Sam.”  
  
Sam pulled the zipper up higher on his hoodie and gave Dean an unhappy look. “Let’s just get this over with and get out.”  
  
“In one piece,” Dean agreed grimly, picking his way around the building with Sam close in his wake. “You let me know if you see anything odd. Okay, Sam? I know you can’t freaking tell usually, but this is _not_ a place I want to deal with an episode of your _whatever_. So I don’t care if it’s a sudden attack of the _sniffles_ \-- you feel weird, we get the hell out, and Bobby and Cas can get someone else to do the job. This is a one-time-only show for us.”  
  
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. The decision to try the job had seemed a lot more justifiable in the sunlight and across town. In the shadows now, the dark, crumbly-looking brick seemed to radiate with a deep, pervasive cold and the two rows of windows were set up well out of reach. Untamed bushes grew up against the wall in some places, either the wild results of landscaping left to fend for itself for half a century or the result of seeds blown in after the place was already abandoned. No grass grew anywhere, and what had once been huge delivery bays were chained shut. Dean gave them a cursory try, but it was almost immediately evident that dealing with the doors, even if they _could_ get the locks out of the way, would be considerably more trouble than it was worth. They paced around to the front and looked at it for a long moment.  
  
The Wilson Glass Co. sign was so faded it was barely legible, especially in the dim light that was penetrating the gloom from over the fence. Sam had trouble not thinking of the rest of the world as “the land of the living,” he didn’t like what that implied about the place they were standing. The lettering on the sign had originally been blue and very crisp -- professional. Now, the broken outlines of the old print looked as sad and derelict as the rest of the place. Soulless. Cracked, cement paving stones had been thrown out of alignment by time and weather and were buried by dust and dried weeds. They found most of the stones by stumbling over them.  
  
The main doors themselves were metal, and very utilitarian looking. The remnants of a marine-blue paint that had probably matched the sign was still flaking from the corners, but the rest had been battered off by fifty years of negligence, and the bare metal was dark and rusted now. Doubtlessly, the doors had been formally locked when the place had been abandoned, considering the circumstances, but two heavy chains and padlocks that had probably been state-of-the-art for the time had been looped through the handles as well.  
  
Someone had been very serious about keeping the place locked down.  
  
Dean walked closer with his flashlight to examine the lock, then took a step back and frowned.  
  
“What?” Sam demanded in a low voice, more creeped out than he could remember ever being on a hunt where nothing had actually _happened_ yet.  
  
“Does it look like this rust has a _pattern_ to you?”  
  
Sam stepped up beside him and looked closely, then felt all of the hair on the back on his neck stand up. He resisted the urge to step back, and keep on stepping until they were in the Impala and on their way somewhere else. Hanging out in motel rooms waiting to go mad was starting to have its attractive side.  
  
“Yeah,” Dean said grimly, sensing Sam’s reaction. “That’s what I thought too. They never use the thumb.”  
  
The rusty metal was covered in long layers of scratches. Ragged rows of four, over and over and over again. A patterning Sam had seen far too often on the insides of doors... and the lids of caskets.  
  
They looked at each other for a long minute, then Dean crouched in front of the door and poked at the rusty chains.  
  
“We can’t get in?” Sam asked, trying to keep the hopefulness from his voice.  
  
Dean snorted, hearing it anyways. “No such luck. The chains and locks are solid, but the handles themselves are, well--” Dean grabbed hold of one and gave it a fierce wrench. It pulled off the door and dangled at the end of the chain connecting it to the other handle.  
  
“What about the actual lock?” Sam asked, resigned to a depressing answer.  
  
“Stainless steel, not really much of a challenge either. I guess no one thought anyone was going to be really desperate to break into a _glass factory_. It’s not like panes of glass are easy to steal, or have a lot of resale value.” Dean pulled a small can of WD-40 and some highly illegal lock-picks out of his coat and set to work. A few minutes later a soft click echoed like a gunshot. A sudden breeze stirred the leaves and ruffled their hair and they both looked around with sudden wariness.  
  
“The wind?” Dean asked doubtfully.  
  
Sam nodded slowly, still scanning the area with great suspicion.  
  
Dean stuffed the equipment back into his pockets. “Then I guess we’re going in.”

~~~~~

  
Even with the lock picked, actual entry was easier said than done. The doors were jammed fast with decades of dirt and decay, and the bottom six inches were completely buried under fifty years of storm runoff and weed growth. They had to dig the debris out by hand, then use the crowbar to try and force the doors apart. Eventually one of them wiggled a bit, and then gave with such suddenness that Dean actually fell backwards, sprawled in the dirt on his ass.  
  
He didn’t say anything about it, though -- just accepted Sam’s hand to get back up, giving the gaping, cavernous hole in the building an angry look as he brushed himself off.  
  
“This is a really stupid idea, Sam,” Dean said flatly.  
  
“Yeah.” Sam didn’t have any argument to that. “You want to, uh...” He glanced back towards where they had pried the hole in the fence.  
  
“We’re already here,” Dean sighed after a long pause during which he actually seemed to be considering Sam’s offer. “And I might be willing to tell Bobby to take a hike, but Cas? It’s important, and we’re already here. Besides, by the time someone gets around to admitting they have a _freaking poltergeist_ attending whatever-High they plan to build on this lot, it will probably have decorated a flag pole with half the student body. Let’s just get this done. Then go on vacation.”  
  
“All right,” Sam agreed, taking a cautious first step inside the dark warehouse-like factory. “Any place in particular?”  
  
“Disneyland,” Dean said grimly, all attention obviously focused on the building as if he expected it to try and eat them. Sam hadn’t discounted that it might, he just figured it would wait until they were deeper in before it tried to take a bite. Less chance they could escape.  
  
With a flashlight trained on the inside of the half of the double door that was still closed they could see the same repetitive scratch pattern. Visible insanity, desperation. The marks made that dangerous corner of Sam’s mind feel a little unsteady, as if for an instance reality was just a little less tangible, a little more...malleable. An involuntary shudder crawled over his skin and he looked away before Dean noticed his distraction.  
  
Besides, there were plenty of other disturbing things to pay attention to.  
  
It was dark inside the factory, but somehow not as dark as it should have been. Thin light filtered in from the high windows and illuminated a huge, cavernous space. It was much bigger-looking inside than it had appeared from the outside. Half of the ground floor looked like it had been sectioned into work spaces by tall dividers of wood and metal, and above that rose two floors of wood beams on metal frames that appeared from their vantage on the ground to be in poor repair.  
  
“I hope we don’t have to go up there,” Sam said flatly, voice loud in the dusty silence.  
  
Dean grunted something noncommittal and continued to sweep the room with the beam.  
  
Huge shelving units and bins still held carefully stacked sheets of glass, and everywhere the flashlight touched, metal and broken shards glittered in the moonlight. The floor was heavily coated with a thick layer of mud and debris where the door and windows seals had probably failed after half a century of heavy rains. By the front door where they were standing was a wide metal desk with an overturned chair. Scattered on the desk were ruined papers, picture frames, an antique Rolodex, and a couple of pens and other items. Sam picked up one of the photos and wiped the dust off the glass; a young girl in pigtails and a sweater looked out from fifty years past. He set it down and picked up a strip of fabric instead. Dark crusty stains still stiffened it and Sam let the bandage drop as soon as he realized what it was.  
  
Dean poked at another wad of dark-stained fabric on the desk, then focused the flashlight on an ancient key ring with keys still attached and a glass bottle coated with some kind of residue on the inside. In the middle of the desk lay a dagger-like shard of glass, the edge and tip brown with what looked like more old blood.  
  
“Those must be left over from the last round of accidents that got this place shut down. I guess when it says they threw everyone out and locked it up, they mean _right then_. Too bad they weren’t also smart enough to shower it with salt and burn it to the ground,” Dean commented quietly.  
  
Sam was practically vibrating in his boots; he could _feel_ something in the air. And it wasn’t friendly, and it was all too aware of them.  
  
“You feel it?” Dean echoed his thoughts.  
  
“Yeah,” Sam replied grimly. “Let’s find this thing and get it over with.”  
  
Dean flung his arms wide taking in the volume of space. “Great. You point the way and I’ll start digging! This place is massive, and we don’t have _one_ clue as to what we’re actually looking for! It could be a _body_ , or it could be a _fingerprint_. You know spooks, they can cling to the smallest scrap of _nothing_ to keep themselves anchored to a place,” Dean said in disgust.  
  
“I don’t think they do it on purpose, Dean. We’ve been around enough to know that sometimes things just get screwed up. We’re doing the ghosts as much of a favor as we are the innocents they’re likely to hurt.”  
  
Dean snorted his opinion of that.  
  
Sam pulled the battered EMF sensor Dean had jerry-rigged one summer out from his back pocket and flipped it on. It immediately ramped up to an ear-piercing squeal.  
  
“Fantastic,” Dean growled. “How are we supposed to find the anchor when the whole goddamned place is active?”  
  
Sam shrugged and readjusted the tuner until the volume and pitch were more acceptable. “Take it step by step until something jumps out.”  
  
“Yeah, because that’s _exactly_ what I want to happen in a freaking haunted factory-- things _jumping out_ at me.”  
  
Dean paused to wedge the broken, overturned desk chair into the doorframe to make sure the door stayed open, then stomped off into the gloom with Sam at his heels.  
  
Scraps of paper on the desk behind them fluttered silently for a moment, then laid still.

~~~~~

  
After two hours of meticulous searching they were grungy, dispirited, and tired of poking through filthy debris and broken glass trying to find something that buried the EMF meter’s needle. It spiked occasionally, but they could never isolate anything specific that might be linked to the spirit inhabiting the premises. Reluctantly done with the ground floor and forced to choose between going up or going down, they chose the wide metal staircase in one corner that led down to what must have been the original glassworks beneath the main floor. Even to their inexperienced eyes, much of the equipment was obviously missing. And just to make everything even more pleasant, the entire area was ankle-deep in damp sludge that must have washed down through the metal grate set into the main floor.  
  
“By the time they closed, they must have been doing the manufacturing somewhere else and just using this place for distribution,” Sam observed.  
  
“Yeah, otherwise this would be a _retarded_ design for doing something that involves fire and melted sand.”  
  
“I think the process is a little more complicated than that,” Sam said absently, examining a wide, flat metal plate on a pivot stand.  
  
“I know what glass is, Sam. I don’t care what else they do to it -- it’s melted sand. And that requires a hell of a lot of heat. It’s not the kind of thing you want to do under a half-floor of metal sheeting and wooden planks. I don’t know why you--” he cut himself off abruptly and froze as a sudden breeze stirred out of nowhere and blew the dust and dirt off the edge of a rotting shelf.  
  
“Do you feel that?” Dean asked Sam in a low voice.  
  
Sam nodded grimly, already picking his way back towards the stairs.  
  
“So much for it being out of juice,” Dean growled as more dust and dirt began to sift into the air.  
  
By the time they reached the ground floor again the gentle breeze had become a full-blown wind and the air was alive with dust and papers. Sam watched one of the smaller pieces of jagged glass slide across the floor and swore, picking up his pace as they made their way towards the propped open door of the main entrance.  
  
“Maybe this is all it’s got?” Dean yelled over the growing racket. Sam didn’t bother trying to reply.  
  
They were less then twenty feet from the doorway and Sam could almost taste the outside air when the ear piercing squeal of twisting metal sliced through the din and a massive shelf of glass sheeting tore from it’s braces and slammed over onto the floor between them and the exit. The explosion sent them both diving for cover. The wind died as if a switch had been thrown and in the deafening silence that followed they could clearly hear the tinkle of settling glass in the level below.  
  
Dean’s swearing was probably audible all the way out into the street. The massive rack of twisted metal had fallen in a way nature would have never allowed and completely blocked the doorway. The force of its impact had embedded it into the wooden beams of the floor, cracking some of the timbers so that even the footing around it was bad. Broken and cracked sheets of glass stood like frozen blades in the wreckage and glittered ominously in the beam of their flashlight.  
  
“We can climb over it?” Sam suggested without much hope.  
  
Dean gave him a withering look.  
  
“Do I look like I want to spend the next week in the ER, Sam? Besides, the floor is screwed up too now, and neither one of is exactly a lightweight. Remember what’s under there?”  
  
“More racks of glass.”  
  
“Exactly. Falling would be like a death sentence. But the brick outside has deep grout and looked like plenty of hand-holds. We should be able to scale down no problem -- if we can just get to it.”  
  
Sam refrained from commenting on the probable strength of those hand-holds and instead shined his flashlight up at the half-stories above them. Some of the wood was missing and the metal plating looked like more rust than solid sheets anymore. The framework was probably stable enough, but stepping in the safe places would be half memory, and half luck.  
  
“Let’s do it,” Sam said finally, lacking a reasonable alternative. They crept cautiously back to where the nearest staircase began, but as soon as Dean set a hand on the rail a shard of glass as long as his arm picked itself up off the floor and slammed into the wall over his head. Sam knocked a desk over and they both ducked behind it just as the whirlwind of destruction exploded back to life in the stale air of the warehouse, this time with enough force to hurl even heavier projectiles.  
  
“I thought you said this thing was _exhausted_?” Dean snarled into Sam’s ear where they crouched together behind the makeshift barrier as the storm raged.  
  
“I said it _should_ be exhausted!” Sam snapped back. “Do I look like the fucking Ghost Whisperer to you, Dean?”  
  
“Remember what I said about _ideas_ , Sam?”  
  
Sam’s acidic reply was bitten off when his attention was caught by a figure that had suddenly appeared behind them. Recognition flooded his entire body with relief.  
  
“Castiel!”  
  
“Cas?” Dean whipped around, then cringed as a metal chair hit the wall behind them. “Where?”  
  
Sam stared at him in bewilderment. “What do you mean ‘ _where_ ’?! He’s right there!” Sam flung out a hand, pointing to where Castiel was standing not even five feet away watching the chaos around them with an expression of mild interest.  
  
Dean’s expression went from hopeful to horrified in the space of a heartbeat.  
  
“He can’t see or hear me, Sam. You’re just going to upset him,” Castiel said calmly.  
  
Sam’s relief vanished in a heartbeat as he understood.  
  
“You aren’t Castiel,” he said sickly.  
  
“Sam, who the fuck are you _talking_ to?!” Dean demanded, stress and fear hardening his voice as he yelled above the din.  
  
Sam just stared helplessly at the figure that was _not_ Cas, and not even _real_ \-- unsure of how to answer Dean’s question.  
  
“I am real,” not-Castiel answered his thought, sounding somewhat offended.  
  
“No, you aren’t,” Sam hissed.  
  
“Sam, you are seriously starting to damage my calm,” Dean growled. He clamped his fingers around Sam’s wrist and squeezed to get his brother’s attention. “Keep it the fuck together. You can talk to the voices in your head _later_.” He shoved them both flat just as a particularly large piece of glass sailed over their make-shift barrier and shattered on the metal beam at their back.  
  
When Sam managed to get back into a half-way sitting position, not-Castiel was still standing there, unmindful of the debris that occasionally flicked through his form.  
  
“It will stop soon, you know,” Sam’s imaginary guest assured him.  
  
Sam turned away, trying to ignore the figure. Dean was watching him with eyes dark and fearful. Sam tried to give him reassuring look, but Dean appeared anything but comforted by the effort.  
  
“It doesn’t have the strength to keep this up for long,” not-Castiel continued. “Keep your head down and you’ll be fine.”  
  
“Who does it look like now?” Dean asked. “And don’t even try to tell me you can’t still see it. You’re paying attention to something and it sure as hell isn’t me or this _freaking ghost that’s trying to kill us_.” He pulled the side of his leather jacket out to protect them from another spray of shards.  
  
“Funny he should mention ghosts,” the not-Castiel said casually, looking out into the depths of the warehouse over their makeshift barricade. “This one has power, but not a lot of precision. If it could aim, you both would have been skewered ten minutes ago.”  
  
“It’s... still Castiel.”  
  
Dean’s eyes grew wide with renewed horror. Preoccupation with survival had distracted him from connecting the dots earlier, but it was suddenly too obvious to ignore. “Castiel-the-angel-who-sent-us-to-this-wonderland-of-fucked-up Castiel? The one that would _talk only to you_?!”  
  
“Yes,” not-Castiel agreed. “Except not really.”  
  
“Uhhh...” Sam looked uncertain. “He says ‘yes.’ Maybe.”  
  
“ _He_ says--" Dean broke off into a storm of sulphurous swearing. “I want my fucking cookie back! Of all _freaking times_ , Sam! Shake it off, I need you _here_ now. You can be crazy _later_.”  
  
Heavy plates of glass started wobbling and falling from the air.  
  
“See?” not-Castiel said calmly. “All out of juice.”

~~~~~

  
“I cannot _believe_ your timing, Sam!” Dean was still raging as they climbed with snail-like slowness up the ancient metal stairs minutes later, testing each one as they went.  
  
“It’s not _my_ timing, Dean!” Sam argued. “This isn’t something I have control over!”  
  
“I should have known,” Dean went on as if Sam hadn’t spoken at all. “I _should have_ freaking known. Cas isn’t above doing the douchey thing and ordering us around, but talking only to you? That should have been a dead giveaway -- but since when do the monsters in your head dress up like _angels_?!”  
  
“I don’t know,” Sam said in a voiced laced with annoyance. “I guess parading around like _you_ or _Lucifer_ was getting old!”  
  
“Does this mean you’re going to be adding to your collection of crazy?” Dean demanded. “At some point in all of this, are you going to be trapped in your skull with the ghost of _Dad_?”  
  
Sam paused mid-step and blinked.  
  
“Don’t worry,” Dean growled, continuing up the staircase without even bothering to take in Sam’s reaction. “I’d kill you myself first.”  
  
“Thank you,” Sam said with complete sincerity.  
  
“I thought--" Dean bit off whatever he was going to say with a sudden shake off his head.  
  
“You thought what?” Sam asked, following Dean’s unspoken words. “You thought I was getting better?”  
  
Dean snorted and tested the ground as he reached the first elevated floor. It seemed stable so he cautiously committed his weight. “No, not even in my _dreams_ can I convince myself we might get _that_ much of a break. But I thought things were at least a little quiet for a few days!”  
  
“They were.” Sam shrugged. “Apparently that’s over now.”  
  
“Yeah, _apparently_.”  
  
“It’s not really, you know.”  
  
Sam swore and almost fell over the railing in surprise as the _whatever_ manifested on the landing next to Dean and looked down at him.  
  
“What isn’t _really_?” Sam snapped.  
  
“It’s back?” Dean asked in resigned tones.  
  
Sam nodded and joined him, giving not-Cas a dirty look. “Yeah.”  
  
“Can you ignore it?”  
  
“Your little vacation from the hallucinations the barrier breakdown in your head is causing -- it’s not really over,” not-Castiel informed Sam. “I’m not one of them. Tell Dean you get to keep the cookie.”  
  
“If you aren’t one of them, then what the hell _are_ you?” Sam demanded.  
  
“I guess that’s a _no_ then,” Dean grumbled.  
  
Sam looked between the two in exasperation. “It says it’s not a hallucination, Dean.”  
  
“Of course it does, Sam. That’s what all the hallucination’s say.” Dean looked around speculatively. “Tell you what, you stay here and talk to your imaginary buddy while I go scope out this level. Think you and your new friend can handle that?”  
  
“He really hasn’t changed much,” not-Cas observed, watching Dean pick his way carefully across the floor slowly without waiting for a reply from Sam.  
  
“Changed since when, and what the hell are you if not some manifestation of the Cage?”  
  
“Since the last time I met him,” not-Castiel said, still watching Dean’s painstaking progress. “I’m exactly who I appear to be, Sam”  
  
“What?” Sam asked, confused. Not-Castiel turned in a slow circle, coat pulled wide open.  
  
“I don’t understand.” Sam said after watching for a minute. “You’re _not_ Castiel.”  
  
“Right,” the hallucination agreed. “I’m not. Come on, Sam,” it prodded when Sam just looked blank, “you’ve been through a lot, but it can’t be _that_ big of a step. If I’m not Castiel, then I must be--” Not-Castiel waited expectantly. The expression looked odd on a face that usually only reflected dispassion, or mild confusion. The human expressions, casual speech-- Sam suddenly got it.  
  
And couldn’t believe he hadn’t gotten it earlier.  
  
“Jimmy Novak,” Sam said flatly.  
  
“See? That wasn’t such a big step,” Jimmy said.  
  
“What about Novak, Sam?” Dean called from deeper in the level.  
  
“Uh. It’s not Cas. It’s--“  
  
“Why the hell would you be hallucinating about _Jimmy Novak_?” Dean asked, baffled.  
  
Sam crossed his arms and stared the hallucination in the eyes. “I don’t know, hopefully it’s about to tell me.”  
  
Jimmy shrugged. “I’m not a hallucination, I’m like any other restless soul displaced when they slough off their mortal coil.”  
  
“He still insists he’s not a hallucination,” Sam called.  
  
“Oh good,” Dean replied in a distracted tone, obviously not taking Sam seriously.  
  
“Say’s he’s a ghost.”  
  
“Oh god,” Dean groaned. “Is he haunting this freaking factory? Because if he is, tell him I’ve got a bone to pick.” Dean muttered something else, but Sam couldn’t make it out over the sounds of things breaking as his brother tipped something over trying to get closer to the windows.  
  
“I don’t feel like I really have your full attention.” Jimmy snapped his fingers and suddenly, instead of the second floor of the glass factory, Sam found himself standing in a completely white room. White walls, white floor, white ceiling.  
  
Just him and his hallucination of the late Jimmy Novak.  
  
“That’s better,” Jimmy said.  
  
“What did you do,” Sam demanded, looking around wildly.  
  
Jimmy shrugged and leaned back against the wall. “Whatever I wanted. I told you, I’m not one of your hallucinations, Sam. This little fracture with reality you have going on is convenient for more than just the horrors lurking in the recesses of your brain. Ghosts, for instance, can wiggle right in if they have enough focus and motivation. It wasn’t really _that_ hard to slip inside the crack and make myself comfortable.”  
  
“You _can’t_ be a ghost,” Sam hissed. “Jimmy Novak isn’t _dead_.”  
  
An expression of unutterable sadness crossed Jimmy’s face for an instant before it hardened into lines of anger and resolve. “Oh, I _am_ dead. I’m not even upset about it -- it was only the polite thing for Castiel to do, after all. Demons like to keep their horses all pinned up inside for that little extra hit of despair, but angels? Angels are Gods chosen ones, and they can be benevolent when they’re moved to be. I gave Castiel my body _forever_ , a permanent residence for a spirit that didn’t have one of its own so it could move freely in the world. In return he set me free so I could pass on to whatever waits for humans on the other side.”  
  
“Then why are you still here?”  
  
There was a dark edge to Jimmy’s unhappy smile. It wasn’t an expression Sam had ever seen on his face before, no matter who was behind the eyes. “The reapers came, but I refused to go. Castiel promised me that Claire would be protected, that my wife and my daughter would be _safe_. I stayed to make sure he kept his word, to watch over them as best I could. To make sure that my _sacrifice_ was _worth it_.” Almost palpable anger twisted through the words, filling the room with seething rage.  
  
“Uh... how’s that going?” Sam finally ventured once the echoes of the outburst had died away.  
  
“Badly.” The ghost started pacing. “Claire could feel me, it was... upsetting her. She cried all the time, woke up screaming when I watched her sleep. Amelia tried to comfort her, tell her that wherever I was she didn’t need to worry about me. But Claire just couldn’t move on when I was always right there. I tried giving them some space, but I couldn’t get far enough and still watch them like I wanted. I started only dropping in occasionally. Once a day. Then once a week. Once a month... The last time I visited my wife was starting to see another man and Claire was sleeping through the nights again.”  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“Don’t be,” Jimmy shrugged. “It’s what I wanted, to see them move on with their lives. To enjoy what I bought for them. I made the decisions that brought me to this place, Sam. I regret their necessity, but not the decisions themselves.”  
  
Sam nodded in understanding. “I get that.”  
  
“Yes,” Jimmy met his eyes, and the mix of resolve and pain in them was one that Sam had seen too often in the mirror, and too often in his brother. “I thought you would.”  
  
“Okay,” Sam said. “So then -- why all this? Why are you in my head, and why the hell are Dean and I in this deathtrap of a warehouse? If you just wanted to _talk_ \--”  
  
“Do you know what the dead can see, Sam?”  
  
Sam shook his head mutely.  
  
“Everything,” Jimmy whispered. “We can see _everything_. Even when something is hidden from us, we can see where that cloud is, what shape the shadows have. Most spirits are trapped here for a reason, so hyper focused on whatever keeps them on this plain that anything else doesn’t even register to them. But not me. I don’t have any anchor, any focus to grind out centuries of rage or fear on. I stayed for my family, by choice, and when they didn’t need me any more I decided to check in on my other big interest. Can you guess what that is, Sam? I’ll give you a hint.” He turned in another slow circle.  
  
“Castiel,” Sam said.  
  
“Castiel,” Jimmy echoed, expression flat. “He promised he would do whatever he could to protect my family, to protect this _world_. To _put things back the way they were_.”  
  
“He’s trying, Jimmy. We’re all trying. Even Dean and I are doing what we can to--“  
  
“You have no idea what’s really going on.” And Sam was suddenly absolutely certain that he didn’t. “Dean’s calling you,” the self-proclaimed ghost added.  
  
“What did you mean about not knowing what’s really going on, Jimmy?”  
  
“In the shadows, with the shades.” The ghost’s tone was almost singsong and his gaze was focused just over Sam’s shoulder. Sam turned, but saw nothing but white. “Castiel has more on his plate than just fixing what’s broken, Sam. You should ask yourself how much you _really_ know about his agenda.”  
  
“Jimmy--“  
  
“He’s dabbling in things that are best left undisturbed. And there’s no way this ends well. You need to stop him.”  
  
“ _Stop him_?” Sam stared. “He’s an _angel_ , what _things_ are you talking about?”  
  
“I can’t see all the details, but I don’t need to know specifics to see the color of the trouble it will bring this world. My _daughter_ , Sam. I gave up everything. He _promised_!” There was a malevolent rage in that last sentence that reverberated through the air. Cracks appeared in the ceiling overhead and through them Sam could see hellfire. He swallowed hard. Wherever in his subconscious the ghost had dragged him, Sam was certain he didn’t want to have to find his own way back.  
  
“Why’d you bring us here, Jimmy?” Sam fought to keep his tone even and reasonable. Whether Jimmy Novak was actually a ghost as he claimed, or just another hallucination, Sam’s best interest was in keeping him calm. “Why pretend to be Cas to convince me and Dean to take this job?”  
  
Jimmy shrugged. “I check in on you and Dean from time-to-time. I played the pawn for so long; I wanted to see what it was like to do the string-pulling for a change. Isn’t this a worthy cause -- saving children from an angry spirit?”  
  
Sam wasn’t actually sure which ghost in the warehouse was the angriest. “It’s going to kill us if we stay here.”  
  
“Not if you destroy it first.”  
  
“It’s throwing sheets of _glass_ at us, Jimmy! Chairs, tables-- this is a _factory. You_ might be a ghost, but Dean and I are flesh and blood and it’s not going to have to get much more pissed off to find something to hurl that will smear us across the wall!”  
  
“I thought you two were supposed to be the best hunters on the planet? You’re going to run from _one_ angry ghost?”  
  
“Maybe not, but there’s more than one ghost in this factory, isn’t there?” Sam asked pointedly.  
  
A hint of genuine smile touched Jimmy’s lips and then Sam was back in the warehouse staring into Dean’s angry, worried green eyes from inches away.  
  
“Hi.”  
  
“Jesus, Sam!” Dean scooted back from where he had been crouched so Sam could sit up. “What the _hell_ was _that_?”  
  
“Jimmy Novak says I get to keep the cookie,” Sam replied shakily, looking around for the ghost.  
  
“Jimmy Novak says--" Dean began in a baffled tone, then seemed to catch the reference and his voice hardened. “Jimmy Novak is _dead_ , Sam, or divinely possessed, or whatever the hell else you want to call it! He’s not a ghost, and he _isn’t_ here! This is in your head, and I need you to keep it together for just a few more minutes so we can get out of here.” He grabbed Sam’s hand and hauled him to his feet. The floor groaned alarmingly under their combined weight and Sam retreated to the top stair to ease the burden.  
  
Sam changed the subject. “Did you find us a way out?”  
  
Dean shook his head. “Not on this floor. The entire thing is rotted out near the wall. The struts are sound, but naturally, none of them are actually _under_ a window, and I can’t find anything I would trust my weight to that is long enough to bridge the gap between them. Whoever built this place was a _moron_ and I’d like to beat them with a tire iron.”  
  
“It wasn’t supposed to be this kind of factory, or any kind of factory. It was supposed to be a place for livestock, Dean. They just kind of added in the rest later.”  
  
“I don’t care.” Dean was not in the mood to extend forgiveness . “We need to check the upstairs. You think you can stay conscious long enough to do that or are you going to need another nap first?”  
  
Sam ignored the dig. “What if that floor isn’t any better up there?”  
  
Dean sighed and looked up to where the moonlight shone against the upper railing. “Then... I guess we get to reconsider our options.”  
  
Sam nodded tiredly and they began the slow, careful climb to the second elevated floor. The staircase was in worse shape than the first one had been, with two of the steps even falling out completely when Dean tested them with a cautious foot. It was so nerve-wracking that by the time Sam actually reached the top floor his hands were cold and cramped from clinging so hard to the rail.  
  
“Stay on the stairs,” Dean said tightly, moving slowly onto the floor.  
  
“I’m not getting good feelings of safety from this staircase, Dean.”  
  
“Then stay on the _beams_ ,” Dean snapped back, taking another step into the room. It was a reasonable direction to move, and followed along where the beams would have been on the lower floor. But Sam had spent more time examining the layout the Dean had and remembered the minor differences. He swore and lunged for his brother; getting a handful of jacket and hauling Dean back just as the ground gave way under his leading foot. They landed together in a pile in front of the stairs and immediately rolled apart, Sam onto the relative safety of the metal and Dean back on an area that had already proved it could hold him. Both of them were breathing hard and Dean’s face was white with shock. He licked his lips twice before he could speak.  
  
“That’s, uh... thanks.”  
  
“Don’t mention it,” Sam replied between breaths still shaky with adrenaline, cold with the realization of what had been a split second from happening.  
  
“I’m gonna just sit here for a minute,” Dean said.  
  
“You do that,” Sam agreed.  
  
After a moment, Dean sighed and climbed to his feet. “Okay, minute’s up.”  
  
“Feel free to take a few more.”  
  
“No,” Dean said grimly. “Every minute we take the ghost is gathering ammo. And who knows when you’re going to flip out again? Let’s get moving.”  
  
Sam stood up and gathered his nerve, then eased onto the floor cautiously; shuffling along a few feet behind Dean. “We haven’t tried the loading doors.”  
  
“You ever try to lift a loading door, Sam?” Dean asked dryly. “Especially the kind that is twenty feet tall for trucks? This isn’t granddad’s aluminum. Those things were powered even back in the day, and for good reason. After fifty years with no maintenance and probably rusted solidly in place? We’d be better off taking swings at the brick.”  
  
“It might come to that,” Sam said grimly, testing a new patch of floor gingerly with one foot.  
  
Dean said nothing.  
  
“If we could deal with the spirit then we could take our time finding a way out,” Sam added.  
  
“If we could _deal with the spirit_ , Sam?” Dean asked incredulously. “Was I the only one paying attention when it turned the entire warehouse into some kind of _unholy blender_? We checked downstairs, we checked the basement, and I don’t know about you -- but that EMF meter is still running in my pocket and it hasn’t so much as beeped while I’ve been checking the upstairs. The only way we can _deal with the spirit_ is by running for our lives, with possibly some casual arson tossed in. But we can decide that later. Right now, the getting out is the only thing we need to be thinking about.”  
  
“But--"  
  
“What part of we _can’t find the remains_ are you having the freaking trouble with?” Dean yelled.  
  
“Let me help.”  
  
Sam spun at the new voice and was startled to find himself literally nose to nose with Jimmy Novak. He yelped and stumbled back onto untested ground.  
  
“Sam, no!” Dean screamed, running towards him with painful slowness as time seemed to stretch out into infinity. Like the space of empty air suddenly beneath Sam’s feet as the floor squelched and caved inwards. He saw Dean stagger and fall, and then it was just rushing sound and weightlessness.  
  
The thunderous crash of shattering glass was the last thing he registered before everything went black.

~~~~~

  
Sam roused to the sound of dripping water and someone slapping at his face with hands that smelled like damp earth and blood. He opened his eyes and met Dean’s in the dim, unsteady beam of a flashlight that was flickering and trying to die.  
  
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he mumbled, then started coughing almost immediately as the thick dust in the air seemed to settle in his throat.  
  
“I said _conscious_ Sam, remember that?” Dean growled, sitting back with an audible groan.  
  
Sam brushed bits of rotten wood and glass shards from his chest and tried to sit up, then sank back some when the sudden movement made his vision dance. “Where are we?”  
  
“I think the basement broke our fall.” Dean had his jacked shrugged off and seemed preoccupied on his side with something Sam couldn’t quite make out. He didn’t have any trouble seeing the scarlet stains on Dean’s fingertips when he pulled his hand back.  
  
“Dean,” Sam breathed.  
  
Dean looked up with a tired expression. “You know, the basement, the first floor, the ground floor, and couple of sheets of glass somewhere on the way. This is some kind of sub-basement we missed. I’m not sure if it was the glass or some rusty nails that did this,” he gestured to his side. “I’m not sure which would be better -- the possibility of tetanus or still having pieces of it in the wounds causing more damage as we try to claw our way out of here.”  
  
Sam was more concerned about his brother bleeding to death than how they were going to get out at that moment. He scrambled to his knees despite the double vision to do his own investigation of the extent of Dean’s injuries. Dean tolerated him prodding around the wound for a minute or two before he waved Sam off and pulled his leather jacket back on with slow, stiff movements.  
  
“It’s just some bad scratches; it’s not going to kill me. Not in the next half-hour anyways. Next time we’re going to fall through a couple of stories, remind me to zip this up. What about you, everything okay?”  
  
Saying that he was beat to hell and his head was killing him wasn’t going to be shocking information; Sam knew what his brother was really asking and nodded. “Yeah, I think so. Nothing broken.”  
  
“Fantastic.” Dean’s eyes narrowed. “Do I need to ask why you suddenly decided to take a stroll across a rotten floor or should I just assume I know the answer and it’s going to piss me off?”  
  
Sam didn’t bother with a reply; instead he looked up at the empty space over their heads. “I... can’t believe we survived that fall.”  
  
“We aren’t lucky enough to just die cleanly in a fall,” Dean said in disgust. “It’s way more likely we would plummet in here, find no way to get out, and have to have a serious discussion about which one of us is going to be eaten first.” Dean was about to add something else when a low whine suddenly attracted his attention. “Do you hear that?”  
  
Sam frowned and started sifting carefully through some of the debris that had fallen around them. The small chamber seemed entirely empty except for themselves and what had accompanied them down into the hole when they had crashed through the ceiling. Bits of three floors, rusted chunks of metal, shards of broken glass, papers, dirt... and the EMF meter, screaming for attention.  
  
“I told you I’d be helpful,” Jimmy Novak commented casually. Sam wrenched his attention away from the meter and found the ghost standing against one of the earthen walls.  
  
“ _Helpful_? You almost got us _killed_!” Sam yelled, then immediately regretted it as the throbbing ache in his head doubled in intensity.  
  
Dean also looked around, scowling. “I don’t care if he’s real or not. You tell that fucking hallucination of yours that as soon as I get out of here and stitched up, I’m going to find a way to beat the crap out of him. Even if I have to go back in time to do it.”  
  
“How is that helpful right now, Dean?” Sam demanded.  
  
“You should both shut up and start digging.” Jimmy suggested. “It might be exhausted, but I suspect it will find new energy to protect itself.”  
  
“Protect...” Sam began, confused -- and then understanding dawned and he frantically started searching his pockets.  
  
“What?” Dean demanded.  
  
“It’s here. Like _right_ here-- that’s why the meter is going off!”  
  
“Shit.”  
  
“Do you have your accelerant? Because mine’s not in my pocket anymore and it won’t do us a whole hell of lot of good to have done all of this and not be able to even burn the damn thing, Dean!”  
  
“Chill out, Samantha. I’ve got the stuff right here.” Dean pulled a battered metal flask out of his pocket. “We just have to find the--” At that moment the dying flashlight finally failed and left them in near-total darkness. The thin moonlight from the factory above could barely reach through the opening created by their decent, and the other flashlight had vanished in the collapse, buried somewhere under the heaps of rubble.  
  
“Perfect,” Dean said acidly. Sam wasn’t exactly filled with excitement either.  
  
“Just wait.” Jimmy Novak’s disembodied voice came out of the pitch black  
  
Sam wasn’t sure if he preferred the ghost where he could see him or not, but he definitely preferred being able to _see_ in general. He felt a wave of relief when Dean’s lighter flicked to life, the orange glow giving a harsh illumination to his face.  
  
“Put that out and wait,” the ghost commanded.  
  
Sam gave Jimmy an irritated look. “We’re not going to stand here in the pitch black _waiting_ for anything. Leave me alone.”  
  
“I’m not even going to ask,” Dean said flatly, using the lighter to examine the perimeter of the room for an exit. After a moment he turned to look at Sam. “Did you throw something at me?”  
  
“What?” Sam asked blankly. Then before Dean could reply, Sam felt it too. Something hit his leg. Then his chest. Then smacked against his face. It felt like paper. But then a piece of wood thudded into the wall next to him and it was past time to go.  
  
“We have got to get out of here,” Sam said grimly. He looked around with a sense of frustrated helplessness. The room wasn’t that large and had an earthen floor, but it was still a good twenty by twenty feet and they didn’t have anything to dig with even if they had the time. “There has to be a door!”  
  
“I’m looking!” Dean snapped, then grunted as a larger piece of debris slammed into his back  
  
Sam ran his own hands frantically over the rough, concrete wall. “Look faster!”  
  
“How did we not know there was a sub-basement to this place?” Dean demanded.  
  
Sam scraped a knuckle on the rough stone and barely registered the pain. “It wasn’t in the building plans!”  
  
“A lot of this _wasn’t in the plan_ , Sam!”  
  
But Sam’s attention wasn’t on the argument. Something strange was happening in the basement, something stranger than the supernatural storm of potential lethal debris starting to build in the small space. A faint blue glow was creeping mistily across the uneven ground.  
  
“Am I imagining this?” he yelled to Dean.  
  
“Nope.” Dean flinched from another hit and let the lighter die, the strange illumination bright enough to see by now.  
  
“I told you to wait.”  
  
“Shut-up,” Sam snapped at the ghost. “What is this?”  
  
“Do you want me to shut-up or answer questions?” Jimmy asked.  
  
Dean elbowed him hard. “Stop talking to it, Sam! We’ve got a bigger problem here!”  
  
“I don’t think ignoring it is going to make it go away, _Dean_.”  
  
“Have you _tried_?”  
  
Jimmy walked across the floor, heedless of the wood and glass swirling through his form. “I can’t believe you guys survived any of your cases, much less the Apocalypse. Your father must have had the patience of a saint.”  
  
Sam ignored that and turned back to Dean who was looking around the room with narrowed eyed.  
  
“Why are we still alive?”  
  
Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “Because it hasn’t managed to kill us _yet_?” he guessed.  
  
“No -- seriously, Sam. Why are we still alive?” Dean asked again, eyes narrowed against the grit in the air. Another chunk of wood half as big as Sam slammed into the wall not five feet away, and a scattering of glass rained down on them as another shard hit over their heads. But the actual pieces hit the dirt without touching either of them. All around them the walls were taking a beating as heavier and heavier pieces of wreckage joined the potentially lethal dance, but none of them managed to touch Sam or Dean as the spirit pounded out its rage.  
  
“You’re welcome.” Sam looked up and met Jimmy Novak’s eyes. The ghost held his gaze for a moment, then looked down. Sam followed the movement and saw where the dirt was being eroded beneath Jimmy’s feet.  
  
“Dean,” Sam said, grabbing his brother’s arm to get his attention.  
  
“I see it, Sam,” Dean smiled tightly. “Let’s dig this jackass up. I don’t know why things aren’t hitting us, and I don’t even _care_ anymore. I just want to get this over with before our luck changes. _Again_.”  
  
In the end they used bare hands to expose the skeleton embedded in the dirt floor, while all around them the spirit raged. Jimmy Novak stayed with them, standing just a few feet away and keeping a silent watch, but only Sam was aware of his quiet presence. Remnants of clothing clung to the skeleton and Sam pulled a rotted scrap of leather from what had probably been a pocket. He peeled it apart and exposed a plastic card protector. Inside an old drivers license was still legible.  
  
“David Gray.” Sam read aloud.  
  
“That mean anything to you?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Drop it back in the hole then. We’re not taking souvenirs.”  
  
Sam nodded and tossed his find back on the body. The storm rose to a new pitch as he emptied his pockets of salt and nodded at Dean.  
  
Dean emptied his flask over the corpse, then grabbed a scrap of paper that was blowing by and lit it. Dean held the smoldering paper over the corpse for a heartbeat and gave the bones a hard look. “You were a total pain in the ass.” He let the paper fall and the body exploded into flames.

~~~~~

  
Almost as soon as the fire engulfed the bones everything in the air just fell, like marionettes with sheared strings. The spectral light was gone, and so was the ghost of Jimmy Novak, but the fire burning down in the shallow trench was just as good for visibility and the air felt immeasurably lighter as they resumed their slow, painful search for an exit. With the spirit vanquished, the adrenaline and sense of urgency were fading and the cold and pain of their wounds and bruises sank in with a vengeance.  
  
“At this point, I’m about ready to call the cops myself,” Dean grumbled, staring up in dismay at the trap door they had finally spotted overhead. Sam didn’t like how fresh blood was smeared over the side of his brother’s jacket or the way he was leaning on things every time he thought Sam wasn’t looking, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it as long as they were trapped in the hole.  
  
It only took about ten minutes to boost Dean out of the sub-basement and for him to find something tall and sturdy enough for Sam to use to climb out himself. Neither of them was excited about climbing back up to the second floor and then down the outside of the building, but they made the second trip went without incident, and once they reached a window they were surprised to find a ladder bolted into the cement barely visible beneath the thick, clinging ivy that covered the outside of the factory walls.  
  
“Fire escape?” Dean asked, leaning far out of the window to test how it was anchored.  
  
“Maybe,” Sam agreed. “Sure you want to risk it?”  
  
Dean swung a leg over. “Feels solid enough, and I’m pretty certain I’m not up to scaling walls with my fingertips tonight any more. Let me get down first, then you can do what you want.”  
  
They reached the ground without any new injuries and made it back to the Impala in less than twenty minutes. No police cars interrupted their passage; no angry spirits hurled anything through the air.  
  
Sam insisted on driving back to the motel, and was almost alarmed when Dean agreed without an argument. But when Dean was finally seated on the edge of their bed and let Sam help him peel his shirt up, Sam was relieved to find that though bloody, messy, and no doubt painful -- the wounds were pretty much as Dean had insisted. Superficial and filthy, but not life-threatening. Dean took a shower, then sat impatiently littering the air with complaints while Sam treated the lacerations and stitched the worst of them up. By the time Sam had finished his own shower, wincing as the soap and hot water found a hundred tiny scrapes and scratches he hadn’t even noticed, Dean had passed out on the bed. Sam turned off the television and managed to roll and prod Dean under the sheets, his brother never waking much past mumbled complaints.  
  
“I’m glad you’re both okay.”  
  
Sam sighed and turned around. Jimmy Novak was standing by the door.  
  
“I need you to leave me alone. I don’t know if you’re a ghost, or a hallucination, or what, but my head’s already crowded enough. If you’ve got something to say, spit it out. And then go away, for good.”  
  
“Tired of me already?  
  
“You almost got us _killed_!” Sam hissed.  
  
“So does everyone else who sends you to do their dirty work. Do any of them apologize?”  
  
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “They don’t have to. We know what the score is when we take those jobs.”  
  
“Do you?” Jimmy’s eyes trapped Sam’s gaze with their intensity. “What was different between you taking this job for me, or taking it for Castiel? You started with the same amount of information.”  
  
“Castiel is an _angel_ , and he’s trying to save this entire _reality_! He’s also been a _friend_ and someone we can rely on. You’re just--“  
  
“Trying to save a few children, and bring your attention to one little, critical, misconception you and your brother seem to be laboring under.”  
  
Sam’s nostrils flared in anger, but he kept his voice low and even. “They would have found the skeleton when they tore the building down--“  
  
“They would have found a hole and piled another dozen feet or so of dirt on top of it.”  
  
“--and I don’t know what the hell you think you’re talking about with Castiel! He’s fighting a _war_ to keep people _safe_. So I have no idea what you can _see_ , or think you _know_ , but--“  
  
“All warfare is based on deception.”  
  
Sam frowned. “What?”  
  
“It’s a quote I read somewhere when I was in college,” Jimmy shrugged.  
  
“I recognized the quote; I just don’t understand the relevance.”  
  
“Because you’re not paying attention.”  
  
“Attention to _what_?” Sam demanded, exasperated.  
  
“Shut-up, Sam,” Dean mumbled from the bed. “Turn off the lights and come to bed.”  
  
“I hid from you the truth of my identity and you and your brother almost died. But my cause was good, and I feel justified in my actions. Do you think that Castiel isn’t equally as capable of hiding truths from you?”  
  
“You’re saying he’s lying about what he’s really doing, with the weapons and the battles and everything else?”  
  
“I’m saying that your ideas of what’s right, and what isn’t, and of _who_ is right, and _who_ isn’t, are all matters of perception. And deception. I only care about my family, but you claim to care about the world. Get to the bottom of this Sam, before it’s too late for everyone.”  
  
In the space of a heartbeat the ghost vanished, and the strange emptiness in the vaults of his mind told Sam he was unlikely to return. He turned to the bed to find Dean looking up at him from heavy-lidded eyes.  
  
“You should be asleep,” Sam said quietly.  
  
“Is he gone?”  
  
“My hallucination?” Or whatever.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Sam shrugged. “For now.”  
  
“I’m going to find a way to fix this, Sam. I am, I swear.”  
  
“I’m not sure that’s the biggest problem on our plate anymore, Dean,” Sam said, sliding under the covers and elbowing Dean’s good side to gain his fair share of space.  
  
Dean scooted over with a frown. “What are you talking about? What could _possibly_ be more important?”  
  
Sam switched the light off and said nothing, the ache of battered muscles screaming as he settled into the mattress. The darkness in the room was easy, soft and almost comforting. Sam thought about what the ghost had said, turning it over and over in his mind while he considered everything he knew about Castiel and their unorthodox relationship with the angel. As he thought about Castiel’s odd distance and the way that even when he showed up these days he volunteered nothing and stayed for only minutes, harried and curt. He had bought Jimmy’s act because there was nothing to distinguish it from the real Castiel’s behavior for the past few months. Cas showed up just long enough to give orders and then vanished off again to whatever battle he was fighting.  
  
Or claiming to fight. Goosebumps stood up on his skin for no reason Sam could put a finger on, things just felt... off.  
  
Castiel said he was fighting to save the world, and for the first time Sam seriously wondered if there could be a place too far to pursue that end.  
  
“How much do you trust Cas?” Sam asked quietly in the still night. The silence stretched so long that for a minute he thought Dean was actually asleep.  
  
“Enough, Sam,” Dean sighed finally. “I trust him enough. And you should too, he’s earned it, you know? Go to sleep. We have enough real monsters to fight in this world without listening to whispers and delusions.” He felt Dean’s hand pat his shoulder awkwardly, and then a few minutes later the familiar rhythm of his brother's soft snores as Dean succumbed to well-earned exhaustion.  
  
But Sam lay awake in the darkness for a long, long time.  
  
  


  
**END**   



End file.
